Evicting Satan—Luke 11:14-28

Please read today’s passage here: Luke 11:14-28

As we have seen, as Jesus traveled about teaching and healing, he occasionally encountered persons who were apparently possessed by demons. Now demons are fallen angels. It is no more difficult to believe that demons exist than that angels do, and even avowed non-believers in Jesus today seem to believe in angels.

Still, my basis for believing anything about the world of spirits, including God himself, is the Bible, not popular novels or movies. It makes no difference to me if the modern source is Tolkien, Harry Potter or Steven Spielberg. They may be great entertainment. I may even enjoy reading them myself. But only as entertainment, not as a source of my belief system.

The Bible tells us that some of God’s angels at some time in the remote past prior to the Creation of humans disobeyed God and rebelled against his authority. They became Satan and the demons. And their chief aim in existence is to demean God’s creatures by seducing them to likewise distrust and rebel against God and frustrate God’s intention to make them noble and happy creatures. Sometimes such demons actually take control of humans against their will and “possess” them.

I will not get sucked into the controversial question of whether there are demon-possessed people in our society today. What is clear to me on the basis of the trustworthiness of Jesus and the writers of the gospels is that during Jesus’ earthly ministry, when it was crucial to derail his mission to save humanity by his ministry, death and resurrection, there was a noticeable outbreak of cases of clear demonic possession. And when Jesus was confronted by a case of it, he took action to free the person suffering.

According to the gospel writers, when Jesus expelled a demon (such as the incident of Legion we read about a few weeks back), he did not do it in order to bolster his reputation. Rather he did it to relieve the suffering of the person under demonic control. Interestingly, the gospels tell us that Mary Magdalene, whom many today falsely claim was Jesus’ wife, had been freed from seven demons.

Yet the crowds could not be unaware of the power he possessed against these supernatural forces. And so his critics and opponents had to explain his ability in ways that would demean him and discourage people from following him.

One of the ways they did this was to claim that he used the very power of Satan (also called Beel-zebul "Lord Prince", the prince of demons) to expel the demons. Their thinking was that since it took supernatural power to do this, and they refused to think it was God’s power, by process of elimination it had to be the Devil’s power.

This was an embarrassing view, because it hardly made sense that Satan would defeat his own army of demons. What would the purpose be? Jesus was quick to point this out, as he does in today’s passage (v. 17-18).

In addition, he went on to ask an even more embarrassing question. “If I am using Satan’s own power to drive out demons, is that also the source of the power your sons employ in trying to accomplish the same thing?” (v 19). Obviously, these opponents would not want to admit that they (or their sons) were dabbling in Satanic power. They were trapped.

Then Jesus applied the hammer: “But if it is by the ‘finger of God’ that I expel demons, then the Kingdom of God has come upon you!” (v. 20). Instead of “finger of God” Matthew’s gospel says “by the Spirit of God”. The two expressions mean the same thing, but Luke’s is more vivid and probably represents the actual words used by Jesus.

Of course, we know that God is a spirit. But being almighty God, he can assume the likeness of a human at any time he wishes. In the Old Testament we are told that God wrote the Ten Commandments on stone tablets for Moses by his “finger”. And when Moses confronted the King of Egypt and demanded that he release God’s people Israel from slavery, God sent miracles of judgment on the Egyptians, which are called “the finger of God”. So the expression means God’s supernatural acts of judgment on evil that show his intention to redeem and free his people from the chains of evil.

Jesus did not come into the world just to stage miracles.He came to save us who were in the power of sin and death. He came to free us from this bondage by his sacrificial death and resurrection. But on the way to the cross, during his earthly ministry whenever he encountered examples of Satan’s oppression of human beings—whether in demon possession, or in persons suffering from illnesses or incapacitations (blindness, lameness, etc.), he acted to show in advance what he intended to do fully by his death and resurrection: to defeat the powers of evil and free human beings to enjoy the loving God who created them and now redeemed them.